


my prayer has always been love

by perfectpro



Series: Overlapping Orbits [1]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:53:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29047194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: Caroline leaves Mystic Falls, travels the world, makes friends with the Mikaelson family, develops a palate for wine, and discovers herself somewhere along the way.Someday, she plans to make her way back to the man who knew the heart of her before she did.
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson
Series: Overlapping Orbits [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2131002
Comments: 11
Kudos: 118





	my prayer has always been love

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Sufjan Steven's Drawn to the Blood from _Carrie & Lowell_.
> 
> I wanted to explore where Caroline was when she was on her way.

She graduates high school with her friends because they all made it. They’re all alive (or, at the very least undead), and she should be able to get a reprieve from supernatural hijinks. Only that’s not how it works, because she has to come back from college to dig up Matt from where he’s been buried alive, because that’s the type of weekend trips that her life is made up of.

Just once, she’d like to go on a beach vacation without worrying that the whole of Mystic Falls would crumble in her absence. 

Exasperated from the hunt, she whirls around to see Klaus, and it isn’t fair. He doesn’t get to leave with nothing but a voicemail and then come back into her life like nothing’s happened. Like none of this matters to him, like _she_ doesn’t matter to him.

For weeks after he left that message, she listened to it on repeat, trying to decipher his true meaning.

_I’m standing in one of my favorite places in the world, surrounded by food, music, art, culture, and all I can think about is how much I want to show it to you. Maybe one day you’ll let me._

What is she supposed to do with the way that he stares at her like there’s nowhere he’d rather be?

Because Klaus has never been the type to stop poking at what is obviously a sore subject when it comes to Tyler, he says, “I hear you two broke up.”

Her hands clench into fists at her sides. “Because I made him choose,” she grits out. The wound is so fresh still, raw from where she’s aching from always being a second choice. She knew what Tyler would be drawn towards, unable to let his revenge fantasy go. 

_Love me more than you hate him_ , she’d told him, but they both knew it wasn’t that simple.

“Would you offer me the same choice?”

That’s what hurts the most, knowing that he would let revenge, however achievable, slip through his fingers if she so much as asked. Just the indication that she wanted him to would have be enough, and yet Tyler will never be able to say the same. No one has ever put her first, not even when she’s been desperate enough to ask, and yet the Original Hybrid with all of his power and his storied past seems to say that, if given the opportunity, he’d never let her go.

She doesn’t try to justify their actions, just lets herself stop thinking for once, and when it’s over he offers her his hand. Reaching out for his help feels like weakness, though, and she pulls herself up by a tree trunk instead. She wishes the moment didn’t feel so defining.

-x-

She moves away from Mystic Falls to finish college, and she feels selfish but she shouldn’t. Elena is tucked away in her coffin for safekeeping, Bonnie is alive and well, and there are no more inevitable disasters on the horizon. Stefan still looks at her like she’s breaking his heart.

Maybe she is, but maybe he should have realized that before. He’s her best friend, but he’s been doing a pretty shit job at it.

Damon, of all people, drives her up to Rochester and helps her unpack. “Let us know when you need us, Barbie,” he tells her before he goes, and maybe he’s the only one who understands that she just can’t stay there. Not whenever everything that’s familiar is gone, when Elena is under a seriously messed up sleeping beauty spell.

All she wants is some semblance of normalcy. Damon is the only who seems to get it. 

(“Do you ever just want to leave?” she asked him, huddled in the boarding house, terrified of going back to Whitmore, of being too far away, wanting to go further.

“Every day,” Damon says, and, oh, she should have known.)

They hug for the first and probably last time before he hits the road again, leaving her to an empty apartment and a city she’s never been in before. She doesn’t know anyone within a five-hundred-mile radius. The sense of possibility is dizzying, and this is the first adventure she has ever taken on her own.

She could be anyone she wants, she knows, but for now she just wants to be Caroline Forbes.

-x-

Her life is Rochester is built from the ground up. She’s sorority president, chairman of three college charity boards, and she organizes the campus clean initiative.

It’s the type of college life that she’d expected, back before she had to be hyper aware of where the closest stock of vervain was, before Damon sunk his teeth in her neck for the first time.

(He apologized for it a few years ago, and she thinks he meant it. Caroline knows he’s not the same person who he was when he first showed up in town, now with his humanity turned on and absolutely in love with her best friend.

She’s forgiven him, but she can’t make herself forget.)

She sets fundraising records, she makes new friends, and she’s challenged in her classes. By the time graduation rolls around again, she’s bored. 

Bonnie always checks in, gives her the latest news from Mystic Falls. She tells Caroline how proud she is, and she asks about job prospects and what she wants to do with her pollical science degree. They have a standing dating on Wednesdays where Bonnie works on witchy homework, trying to test her magic, and Caroline writes essays on public policy and how nonprofits are regulated.

They never say _I miss you_.

“Of course you’re bored,” Bonnie agrees when Caroline finally admits to it. “You’re a literal vampire planning charity auctions and organizing blood drives. You can do anything you want to.”

Spinning her pen through her fingers, Caroline says, in an offhand way, like it doesn’t matter, like it’s not important to her at all, “I just want to make you guys proud.”

She doesn’t elaborate on who that consists of. Bonnie, Elena, her mom. Even Stefan, who looks so sad every time that he asks her to come home that she stopped picking up his calls.

“Care,” Bonnie says abruptly, so sincere when she calls her name that Caroline has to look at her through glassy eyes. “We’re always going to be proud of you.”

That night she thinks about how proud she is of the life she’s been able to build for herself. Everything she has here is something she’s earned. No compulsion unless absolutely necessary. Making it on her own is important, and it’s meaningful, and she misses her friends so much it’s hard to breathe.

-x-

Returning to Mystic Falls only helps so much, because she’s just reminded of why she left.

It’s almost a relief when the drama starts up again and Bonnie needs herbs and hard to find witchy ingredients for a spell. Caroline is all too relieved to pack her bags and board a plane to Egypt with a promise to find the dried leaves of a plant that only grow in the shadow of the pyramids.

The shadow of the pyramids. Her life is a Dan Brown novel.

When she lands, there’s a voicemail from Bonnie saying that mugwort was actually able to work fine and they don’t need it anymore, so Caroline is looking at an open-ended vacation to one of the seven wonders of the world. There are worse things to do with her time.

She dives into the culture, bartering in the marketplace for scarves that are dyed such brilliant colors it seems like she’s seeing them through a filter. Everything feels that way, so new and fresh that it can’t possibly be real. 

For the first time since she walked into that apartment in Rochester, her life feels full.

In the journal she keeps for Elena, she writes the following:

_Everything in Egypt is beautiful. The atmosphere is different from home – sandy when the wind blows through, yes, but even your human nose would be able to notice the spices that hang in the air. By the time you wake up, I’ll have mastered all my favorite recipes. Better yet, I’ll bring you here and you can explore for yourself._

She spends three weeks exploring Giza and then Cairo, buying something from every food vendor she comes across, and trying to commit the experience to memory. 

She doesn’t learn much of the language, but apparently compulsion works regardless of whether its intended target understands English or not. So she uses it when necessary, and she doesn’t even feel bad about it. She’s pretty sure she overpays for everything that she buys anyway.

The wildest part is that she goes hunting and gets a camel. A camel! She sends a picture to Stefan, who is still terrorizing Virginia’s bunny population. _Eat your heart out_ , she captions it.

What’s the point of being a vampire if you can’t have some fun?

-x-

When she leaves of Egypt, she doesn’t go home. She takes a camel ride to Israel, and instead of setting off immediately for the next country, she buys Rosetta Stone for Hebrew and rents an apartment in Jerusalem. It’s not so much putting down roots as it is a constant desire to sink her toes into the dessert and fall asleep basked in the sunlight.

Watching the sun over the ocean off the shore of Tel-Aviv, she thinks of Klaus for the first time in years, and lets herself be grateful that he left her behind, that he asked and then respected her decision.

 _There is genuine beauty in the world_ , he’d told her, and now she thinks she knows what it looks like.

The photo that she takes and sends home is stored in the envelope without further explanation, but she thinks her mom will understand what it means all the same. Their relationship is easier like this, in some ways. No power struggle, no human versus vampire dynamic to bother them. Just Liz Forbes, small town sheriff, and her daughter who is traveling the world. They could almost be anyone.

Time slips by before she’s consciously aware of it, and two years have passed before she returns stateside. Only for a visit, she knows. She’s been thinking about maybe going to Europe, doing a pilgrimage to Rome, and Bonnie is unsurprised to hear the news.

“Did you really think we needed something from a plant grown in the shadow of the pyramids?” she asks with a grin, and sometimes Caroline thinks her friends know her so much better than she even knows herself.

-x-

Europe treats her well, and she settles into the rhythm of it, not as loud or crowded or boisterous as the middle east. She starts in Italy, a rented room in Venice from an Italian grandmother who teaches her to make pasta from scratch.

The seafood is fresh, the lemons taste like an entirely different fruit than anywhere else she’s ever had them, and she starts learning to have opinions about wine. Beyond just knowing if it’s white or red.

She moves inland to help out with a vineyard run by an elderly couple and their grandson who just returned from college to help with the family business. He tastes as sweet as the grapes do. When he looks at her, she’s filled with a heat she hasn’t felt in years. The summer passes in sporadic bursts, days slipping away, and she sends all of her friends a bottle from the first harvest she helps with.

Stefan finds her easily using the label on the wine, and she avoids meeting his eyes when she says, “I didn’t know you were looking.”

The late September air is cool around them, and she thinks that there was a time in which she could have loved this man. 

They could have lived out an eternity together, finding their home in the world and putting down roots. Once, that would have been everything she could have wished for, and she wouldn’t have wanted for anything else.

“I miss you, Caroline. Come home,” he says, and she knows as soon as he asks that of her that she’d never be fulfilled with that kind of existence. Not anymore. There is so much to do, so much to explore, and how can he just ask her to leave this behind?

There was a man once who knew what she was, who knew the heart of her before she did. _Small town boy, small town life. It won’t be enough for you._

Stefan stays, even after he knows she won’t go back with him, and it’s nice to have a friend. It’s nice not to hide who she is, to have company when she hunts, and to lean against him when they’re drunk on a bottle of wine that she can taste every note in.

“What do you still want to see that you haven’t yet?” she asks him before he leaves. His boarding pass is on the table by her door so he won’t forget it on his way out.

She knows he was in Europe for World War Two, but she doesn’t know if he’s been back since. Besides, there’s so much in Italy that they can still do before his plane is set to leave. Vatican City, the ruins of Rome. Something in her needs to know the dream she’s giving up on.

He smiles at her a touch uneasily, and he brushes his thumb across the back of her hand. 

Once, she would have given anything for a boy to show up outside her door and ask to come with him. “I think I’ve seen all I want to,” he says at last, and she has her answer.

She isn’t that girl anymore.

-x-

A chance encounter with Rebekah in Paris over fashion week makes her reflect on how much she’s grown as a person. Without high school or boys or petty feuds or a growing army of hybrids between them, they actually get along fairly well.

Everything feels so long ago that it doesn’t matter. Caroline can’t believe that one of the great fits she’s thrown in her life was over having to let the other girl onto the cheerleading squad. In hindsight, she thinks she knew she’d always get to this point if she lived long enough, looking back on her life and feeling like those memories belong to someone else.

“I love your dress,” Rebekah tells her at the afterparty, sounding like she hates to admit it.

“It’s from next spring’s collection,” Caroline says with only a small amount of guilt, because if there’s anyone who doesn’t have room to judge her it’s this Original. “I compelled the designer.”

Rebekah laughs so suddenly that they catch the attention of those around them. “You have good taste,” she admits, linking their arms together and Caroline finds that she doesn’t mind at all, being pulled through the party by a girl who she’d have happily killed if she were able to all those years ago.

They end up wedged at a table in an alcove, sharing a waiter as they catch up. Caroline gives the man some of her blood when they finish, compels him to feel better and forget about it, ignoring how Rebekah watches with a pursed mouth.

Just because she’s no longer fully committed to the bunny diet doesn’t mean she can’t alleviate the suffering she causes. 

“I’m only here for the week, otherwise I’d show you around,” the Original says with a touch of regret. She passes along the name of a supernatural club in the catacombs with strict instructions on how to access it from the road.

“Just passing through?” Caroline asks as she grabs two glasses of champagne from a circulating waiter. 

With a nod, Rebekah takes her first swallow and lets it fizz on her tongue. “I’m going to see Nik. He’s remodeling his villa in Florence, and I just know he’s going to get rid of the classic features if there’s no one to stop him.” She scowls at the thought, finishing her glass and replacing it with the one that Caroline had intended for herself.

How odd, to hear anyone talk about Klaus in such a casual way. _I’m going to see Nik_ , she’d said, a visit to a sibling who is loved and hated in turns. 

Caroline makes herself smile, unwilling to process whatever emotions she’s experiencing while Rebekah is here. She retrieves another glass of champagne, determined to guard this one, and wishes her well on her travels. 

Before they part ways for the night, Rebekah places her hand on Caroline’s shoulder and purses her mouth before announcing, “He’d hate me if he knew I ever said this, so you’d better not gossip. He’d love to see you.”

Message delivered, Caroline doesn’t get a chance to respond before she’s standing alone in the cobblestone alleyway, wondering what she’s supposed to do with that information.

-x-

She makes it a decade before curiosity gets the better of her and she heads to Florence. She’d never found her way there before during the time she spent in Italy, and she discovers that she loves it just as much as she had loved Venice, Palermo, and Naples. Her accent sticks out at first since she hasn’t used the language in a while, but she immerses herself in the culture, feeling like she’d never left.

Bright colors, homemade pasta, and basil plants with leaves that grow as big as her hand. She has no idea if he’s here, no idea if she even wants to see him, and yet her heart feels so full.

When she does see him, it’s by accident when she does a double take at a man with dark golden curls. She’s gotten in the habit of it since she’s been here, and this is the first time it’s been worth it.

Klaus is standing in front of the counter at a pottery store, holding up something made of clay and discussing with the woman in front of him what it’s worth.

He’s preoccupied, and she’s so relieved that her treacherous heart doesn’t beat loudly enough to give herself away. It takes her a long moment to rip her eyes away from the sight, because something in her told her that she never wanted to see him again. It’s startling to have that proven to the contrary.

By the next morning, the room she’d made a home in has been packed up completely, and she has a series of train tickets that will take her to Vienna. Better to run now then stay and risk seeing him again.

-x-

The next time she sees a member of the Original family, as luck would have it, is when Kol sprints past her on the street in Mexico City. She chases after him before she thinks about it, and he yells at her to barricade the door of the small shop they’ve found themselves in.

Again, without thinking, she does so, figuring that she should at least be smart enough to be wary of anything that sets an Original on edge. They shove bookcases and shelves in front of the entrance, and once they’re locked in the back office, another barricade between them and the outside world, he has the nerve to smile at her and say, “It’s been a while, hasn’t it, love?”

She looks at him through her sunglasses and laughs at the familiar term of endearment, harder than she can remember in years.

“So, why are we hiding here, and what supernatural entity is about to eviscerate us all?” she asks him at last, once she’s recovered and he’s no longer glancing at the door like he expects it to explode off its hinges at any moment.

He shrugs, running a hand through his hair, and says, “Afraid I pissed off an ex-girlfriend.”

The idea is laughable until she remembers Klaus mentioning how Kol had always had a penchant for witches, and then she thinks that she’d probably be pretty respectful if any of her exes had that kind of power.

Well, she guesses Tyler was more powerful than her, but she doesn’t really think of him as an ex anymore. Too much time has passed between the events, and now when she thinks of him she doesn’t think of him so much as how she felt when he’d walked away.

 _Love me more than you hate him_ , she’d said, but he’d never been in the habit of putting her needs first.

“Am I in danger now, too?” she checks in, standing up and starting to explore the room they’ve blockaded themselves into.

His devil may care attitude pissed her off from the little she remembers of him in Mystic Falls, but she’s given up that need for control, and now it just relaxes her to know that she probably won’t end up staked at the end of this encounter.

“Only if she assumes that you’re the bird who left your panties in my coat pocket,” he admits without a hint of remorse.

-x-

Lurking around Florence has become something of a habit, and she gets to know the city’s roads and paths over the years. She’s not looking for Klaus, not necessarily, the memory of her heart in her throat the last time she’d seen him too fresh in her memory.

Rather, she thinks she’s preparing herself, but she doesn’t know for what.

She’s on her way to the airport when Sheila, one of Bonnie’s daughters, calls to ask if she can find something in Berlin. On display in a museum, she sends a picture of the knife and a link to the exhibit. 

“I’ll see what I can do,” she responds, because it’s a big ask but it’s for a good reason.

Anyway, she somehow hasn’t made her way to Germany before. 

When she gets to the airport and has compelled her way into the terminal, she spies someone familiar out of the corner of her eye.

After all, there’s only one person who would fly in a suit that costs that much. 

“Elijah,” she calls, throwing her bag over her shoulder as she waves to him. The look of faint surprise that flickers over his face before settling towards fond recognition is nice, because she’d always liked him the most out of Klaus’s siblings. 

She says out of Klaus’s siblings because if it’s changed to the Mikaelsons, Klaus gets lumped in there too, and she just isn’t sure of where she ranks him. Or maybe she’s perfectly aware of how he would rank, and she just isn’t ready to admit it to herself yet. There’s a reason she hasn’t sought him out yet.

-x-

Werewolf packs are hard to find and harder to run from, Caroline discovers as she’s sprinting through a swamp in northern Canada. She doesn’t have friends so much as acquaintances, the supernatural beings that she meets on her travels and trades favors with. A young witch whose couch she’d crashed on had needed some assistance with gathering a specific type of mud from a marsh.

Mud that needed to be gathered under the light of a full moon.

As it turns out, that marsh just so happens to belong to the local werewolf pack, and they don’t take too kindly to spying a vampire who hasn’t secured entry beforehand.

“I didn’t even know that you were here, how was I supposed to ask for permission?” Caroline shouts behind her as she runs.

Not for the first time, she thinks of how unfair it is that vampires are susceptible to something as commonplace as wood, while the wolfsbane that werewolves take issue with can only grow in certain climates. She’s running through a forest; this place is basically a deathtrap.

One misplaced step and she’s risking a wayward branch and a pretty significant weakness.

This is the last favor she’ll do for a witch; she knows that much.

By the time she’s escaped, two dead wolves left on the path as a warning to the rest of the pack, it occurs to her that she should be grateful none of them managed to graze her with their teeth. The cure isn’t something she has access to at the moment.

-x-

Bleeding out on a table in a Dubai isn’t how she plans to die. Furious, she hisses through clenched teeth, “If you nudge that splinter any closer to my heart, I’ll find a way to come back and haunt you.” She doesn’t know if that’s possible or what’s happening with the afterlife, but she’ll figure it out.

Kol steadies his hand, tweezers poised as he rips at her skin, trying to stop the wound from closing up and keeping the bits of wood inside. “I’m the reason that stake didn’t hit its target,” he grouses, the sweat between his eyebrows giving away how terrified he is. “You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

“And you’re the reason as to why they were feeling murderous in the first place,” she gasps, digging her fingers into the tabletop when he reaches into her chest cavity and pulls one out.

Swearing loudly, she doesn’t bother to keep her voice down. 

The human faction in the city had apparently been making bargains with the witches, and they were being led by a hunter who was enraged at Kol having managed to cheat death once again. 

Caroline had been shopping, minding her own business, weighing silks that flowed through her fingers like water when Kol had spotted her, grabbing her hand and pulling her down the street as he tried to explain what was at risk.

They aren’t exactly friends, but again, she values her life enough to know that an Original running away from something is never a good thing. 

By the time she’d been staked, far too close to her heart for comfort, she’d regretted ever trying to help out. For the most part, he creates whatever chaos he ends up in. Next time, she’ll let him clean up his own mess.

There’s only one splinter left when Kol pauses, and Caroline resists the temptation to strangle him. If she has to wait for him to wake up from death, there’s a good change the bit of wood could move even deeper. Better to keep her last hope alive, literally.

“Just get it out,” she snarls, letting out her breath only when he’s lifted the final bit away and she’s not in danger any longer.

She exhales, unable to remember the last time that she had actually come so close to death since Mystic Falls. The blood rush is so loud in her ears that she can’t hear what Kol says next and she has to ask him to repeat it. 

“I said, love, that I think Nik would kill me if he found out I’ve seen your breasts more recently than he has. I’m not keen on being daggered for the next century or three, so would you mind keeping this bit to yourself?” he asks, nonchalant as anything, tossing the tweezers on the desk. They’re bloody, as to be expected.

The implications of his words sink in, and all at once she wants to ask after Klaus and never hear his name mentioned again. 

Closing her eyes, she feels the skin on her chest start to knit itself together once more. “I’m going to do you a favor,” she tells him finally. “You’re going to buy me a vineyard, and we never have to speak of this again.”

-x-

Without fashion week, Paris is just smoggy and too brightly lit for her tastes, so she adventures elsewhere in France. After having spent countless hours staring at his paintings in museums throughout the country, she goes to Giverny to see Monet’s gardens in person. It’s her last stop on the pilgrimage she’s set for herself.

Rouen Cathedral and the Seine in Paris and the House of Parliament in London are beautiful at all hours, but she goes to his gardens to fully immerse herself.

There are some things that don’t live up to expectations. The Eiffel tower had been like that for her, just metal propped up and too many tourists milling about. In a way, she finds herself holding her breath as she makes the drive, nervous that she’s set herself up for disappointment.

If anything, she hadn’t expected enough of it.

Green and beautiful and in bloom in the springtime, the gardens seem to have been waiting for her. She feels so choked up by emotion that she has to sit down. The water lilies in front of her rest on the teal water, blooming into lavender petals, and for some reason she feels as though she’s found a piece of herself, or perhaps she’s leaving a piece of herself behind.

Here, in Giverny, she looks at her reflection in the pond water and wonders who she’s becoming.

It’s been more than a century since she was turned. She, Damon, and Stefan celebrated the passing of her hundredth death day in DC, and she’d stopped by to see Bonnie as well since she was so close by.

Witches live longer than normal humans, but Bonnie will pass on soon. She knows it, tells Caroline and Damon where her journals for Elena are, makes sure that her affairs are in order. Her two daughters and their children are aware of the magic that runs in their veins, the things that a Bennet witch must assume responsibility for.

In a few years, give or take, Elena will wake up. Caroline left her journals with Damon, figuring that she can bring the last one with her when she comes back for the big event.

They’ll have a funeral to attend of course, but at least there’s something to look forward to.

-x-

When Elena wakes up, they go on a girls trip to New York City and Caroline shows her around the nightlife scene. It’s changed since she used to spend her spring break here with friends from college, but the main parts have stayed the same. They go to Broadway shows and tour Times Square and act like complete tourists, and it feels good to be connected to a part of her old life. All these years gone by, and Elena wakes up in a new world.

(Elena had mentioned that maybe they could take their trip to New Orleans for Madi Gras, but Caroline talked her out of it without too much of an issue.

In all of her travels, she’s never gone there. 

_All I can think about is how much I’d like to show it to you._

She thinks that one day she’ll let him.)

“Everything is so different,” Elena says over their midnight meal of milkshakes. “You’re so different.”

Caroline can’t help but smiling at that, because she is different. Her skin feels like it fits now, like she’s settled into the person she was always meant to be. “But I’m still your best friend,” she says after a moment of silence, reaching over with her spoon to steal some of Elena’s chocolate creation.

Eyes crinkling as she smiles, Elena sighs and reaches over to link their hands on the counter. “Yeah,” she agrees easily, “but you’re just so different. You’ve grown into yourself.” She sighs, almost wistful. “I guess some part of me always expected I’d wake up and some things would still be the same.”

It’s not a feeling that Caroline can identify with, but she knows that she’ll never have to feel that way, like she was locked out of her own life for more than a century.

When she thinks about it like that, she’s reminded of what Rebekah said being daggered felt like.

There is so much for her to adjust to. Earlier in the night, when Caroline had borrowed a tourist because she’d been feeling a bit peckish, Elena had gasped in horror and it had taken a moment to understand why.

She’s grown into everything about her. Even the parts of her she would have thought of as monstrous when she’d first transitioned. 

Wiping the blood from the corner of her mouth, she shrugs, feeling a little lost. “I still mostly use blood bags,” she says, wishing for a moment that she didn’t have to justify herself.

The diner is lively around them, the type of atmosphere that would suggest it’s much earlier in the night. The trip has been fun, if strange for both of them. Everything feels new and weird in their relationship, learning how to function as a twosome. She isn’t the only one who feels that way.

As they get back to their hotel room, Elena sways her way to the bed next to the window, because she’d tried to go drink for drink with a vampire. Caroline closes the curtains to avoid waking up with more of a headache then she’s already earned, and when she gets out of the bathroom, Elena is pulling the blankets over her head.

The only sound is that of the air conditioning unit that buzzes to life, and Caroline thinks that she would give anything to have the third part of their trio with them.

“I miss Bonnie,” Elena whispers, and that’s all it takes for Caroline to get choked up.

“Me too,” she says, and she crawls into the empty side of Elena’s bed, because she doesn’t want to sleep alone tonight.

-x-

She sticks around longer than she’d planned. There’s always a guest bedroom open to her in the Salvatore house, so she stays for Elena’s and Damon’s wedding.

They put her event planning skills to good use, and she spends hours with fabric swatches trying to get the perfect level of contrast between the napkins and tablecloths. Stefan makes fun of her for it, suggesting they use teal as one of the primary colors when he knows that Elena wants it to be neutrals with metal accents.

She picks the table settings and schedules tux fittings for Damon and Stefan, and she goes wedding dress shopping with Elena no less than three times. (They find the perfect gown at a bridal boutique in New York, and Caroline cries when Elena comes out of the fitting room.)

“When are you going to put these skills to use for yourself?” Damon asks, leaning against the doorframe.

Tying her hair back to keep it out of her face and so she can see the seating chart better, she glances up at him and tries to picture what type of boutonniere would look best on him.

“I did have a party a few years ago, after fashion week in Milan,” she comments, because she likes the organization and anticipation of bringing an event together. Rebekah had made an appearance, kissing both her cheeks like a French heiress before sweeping off to where Kol was apparently in trouble in New Zealand. 

(“Do you want me to come with you?” Caroline had asked, even though she hadn’t seen Kol since their encounter in Dubai and wasn’t feeling particularly generous towards him.

Rebekah’s eyebrows shifted incrementally in surprise. “We’ve got it under control.” Sipping her champagne, she commented in a way that was clearly as purposeful as possible, “That wasn’t exactly the brother I expected you to volunteer to visit, anyway.”)

She meets Damon’s eyes, deliberately misunderstanding the question.

There haven’t been many that she’s let herself get close to through her travels. Other than her run-ins with the Mikaelsons and occasionally coming back to spend time with the Salvatore brothers, her contact list has stayed fairly sparse. She knows her people, and she knows they’re there for her when she needs them.

She’s found she doesn’t need much more than that.

-x-

When she leaves America, she doesn’t bother going back to her apartment in London. She doesn’t go back to her apartment in Venice either, or the one in Paris with a view of the Eifel tower that tourists would swoon for.

Instead, she longs for one of the first passions that she found when she came to Europe. She sets up a small house in Champagne, France, and spends her days among the vineyards.

The process is much the same, but she notes the distinctions and learns what the difference between each press of the grapes means. Such care goes into each aspect, from the types of bees that pollenate the vineyard to the creation of the labels on each bottle. Even the corks are stamped with pride, and she drinks enough of the good stuff that she realizes the bottle that Damon spent nearly a grand on for the wedding was basically swill.

In an act reminiscent of her first foray into Italy, she sends them each a bottle from the first batch she’s involved in. 

If her friends could see her now, she wonders what they’d make of it. The Caroline whose dinner always consists of a blood bag, a fresh baguette, and champagne is a far cry from the girl who’d insisted on having low fat cottage cheese and fruit every day for lunch in high school.

Her tastes have changed, have grown as she’s explored.

Elijah comments on it when he finds her in the café she frequents the most. “An old favorite,” he says, and she wonders just how old. 

They split a bottle of her choosing, and she’s happy to have someone who knows what he’s talking about when he complements her choice. Elijah has always been more old world, more concerned with the classics than the rest of his siblings. Rebekah drinks hard seltzers, Kol drinks more vodka than anything else, and Klaus has bourbon as his preferred option.

“Bourbon,” Elijah tells her tartly, his nose wrinkled. “So American.”

She resists the urge to remind him that he was born in America. Plus, the hard seltzers seem like they should offend his sensibilities more.

He makes no further mention of Klaus, and he’s enough of a gentleman to pick up the check. As he walks out, Caroline wonders just how random of a happenstance it might have been.

-x-

When she leaves Champagne, she’s tempted to return to Florence. Instead, she moves to Amsterdam and buys a bouquet of fresh flowers every Friday to keep on her dining room table.

The tulips are lovely when they’re in season, bursting with enough color to remind her of the silks in Egypt. She buys orange first, so bright it’s almost neon, and on her third week to pick up a bunch, the seller insists that she take a spray of pink ones instead.

Similar to the orange, they’re positively glowing. When she leans in to inhale their floral scent, a petal brushes against her lips. She pulls away to find that her lipstick is almost a perfect match.

“You must take them; they were made for you,” the seller tells her, waving her wallet away when she goes to pay.

When the pink tulips wither, she goes to Holland to see the fields where they grow. The scent clings to her skin when she goes home, and she thinks that she’d never expected to live this kind of life, to find this kind of fulfillment alone. She can’t bring herself to regret it.

Three months in the Netherlands, two in Sweden, and only one in Finland before she grows restless again.

There are more adventures to be had. More art to see, flowers to smell, and languages to learn. She’s never walked the Wall of China, or seen the Parthenon. Every city has spots for the locals and the tourists, and she wants to go everywhere, to see everything. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask for.

She just doesn’t want to do it alone anymore.

-x-

She touches down in Florence and thinks that maybe she’s ready.

The villa that Rebekah mentioned all those years ago isn’t too hard to find. She knows that it belongs to Klaus by the herb garden out back, and the scent of paint tells her where his studio is located.

Hadn't this been what he'd seen for them all those years ago?

_Perhaps one day, in a year or even a century, you'll turn up at my door and let me show you what the world has to offer._

There's still so much to see, even if she's seen most of the world on her own.

She waits around the villa for a week, and even when she’s given up on sitting on his steps, flipping through whatever book looked interesting at the shop a few kilometers away. She doesn’t like the classics, but she figures she’s old enough that she doesn’t have much of an excuse for not having read them before now. She finishes _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ , _Les Misérables_ , and _Great Expectations_ before she hears whispers of a coven, a weapon, the plot to end the sire lines.

Investigating just leads to dead ends at first, and she can’t find any of the other Original siblings, even when she’s actively looking. Part of her thinks that it’s a good thing, that they’ve gone into hiding for their own protection, but mostly she just wants to know that they’re okay.

It’s months before she hears of any specifics. There’s a coven in Chile and a coven in Greece, both equally culpable, so Caroline hops on a plane for an hour or two to figure out what they’re working with.

What they’re working with, really, is a plan to kidnap her, drain her of her supernatural lifeforce, and apparently that’s the plan for when they get ahold of Klaus and his siblings as well. Also, she’s pretty sure they’d throw in some old-fashioned torture for fun. They seem like that kind of coven.

Her visit is for recon purposes, or at least it is until a witch grabs her and reaches for her heart, and Caroline decides that she doesn’t need to worry about being nice to these people. Elena had been unnerved to see her drink from the vein; she doesn’t want to know what she would make of the carnage that she’s truly capable of when threatened.

Once they’re all dead (thirteen, an even baker’s dozen, the unluckiest of all numbers), she sets about separating the heads from the bodies and then salts the earth of their cemetery, because these people don’t deserve to be buried in consecrated ground.

She goes back to her hotel to shower, and the water runs red for several minutes before turning a murky rust color. Washing her hair twice seems to get most of it, and the third time really is the charm. Scrubbing the blood out from under her fingernails takes more than fifteen minutes.

Lavender soap covers up the scent of death that still clings to her.

When she looks at herself in the mirror, she thinks that no one would know what she’s done. She appears to be a seventeen-year-old girl, blonde and freckled. Human. Harmless.

She expects to not be able to sleep that night, to stay awake with memories of what she did. The lengths that she went to. She expects nightmares, at the very least. Instead, she falls asleep in the time between one breath and the next, and she wakes up in the morning, ravenous.

Two blood bags later and she’s still hungry, so she stops by a street vendor and buys a lamb gyro.

The tzatziki sauce drips everywhere, and she buys another without bothering to ask for a napkin. 

In the morning, she goes to Athens to see the Acropolis. Standing before its ruins, she wonders how long she will live, whether she will ever see civilizations rise and fall.

-x-

The coven taken care of, or at least the Grecian portion, she’s chartered a flight to Chile when she hears more whispers. Of a hybrid who ended an entire coven line, including even their non-magical ancestors.

Klaus has never been anything but thorough.

Instead of heading out to Chile, she goes back to Florence, and she waits. 

In the evenings, she makes homemade pasta the way that her first Italian landlord taught her all those years ago. Eggs and semolina flour in salted water, served with a sauce made from fresh tomatoes that simmer with a parmesan rind. 

She drinks wine, good wine, the kind where she knows the vineyard and the harvest quality for each year. She remembers the seasons, which years were too dry or too wet, and she tastes each note until it feels like she’s bursting. It reminds her of when she first came to Italy, sitting at her balcony in Venice and watching the surrounding waters. 

Then, she had no idea of what life has in store for her. Every day was a new gift. Now, there is a routine to her time here, a thing that she is waiting for.

Two weeks into it, she’s decided that she’ll go back to England in another few days if she can’t find him. She knows they have a house there, or at least Rebekah does, but she wants to find him herself.

More than two hundred years have passed, and she wills herself to not get her hopes up. The last time she saw him was in a pottery shop in this very town, and he hadn’t even seen her. They hadn’t even spoken. What is he going to say when he finds her sitting outside his house?

Her worries and the warm sun lull her into safety, into sleep. She wakes to the scent of an open wound, fresh blood stemming from Klaus’s wrist as he stands a few feet from her. 

Their eyes lock, and the first thing that she can think is he’s more beautiful than she’d remembered.

So many times, she’d thought about what she’d say at their reunion, but she thinks the pounding of her heart betrays everything that she’s thinking. Propping up on her elbows, she lets herself look over him, seeing how he wears the fashion of the time, knowing that he brings the old world with him.

 _I intend to be your last_ , he’d told her all those years ago. She hopes he meant it.

“I was waiting for you,” she says at last.

His wrist stops bleeding, the wound closing over, and it occurs to her that the first thing he felt when he saw her was concern. Enough to give her his blood without question.

His mouth curls into a smile, loose and easy as anything. Any worries she might have had drain away when he finally returns, “Hello, love.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've really enjoyed writing for this couple a lot recently, and this is probably my record for as many works started and finished in a row.


End file.
